LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Cheap shot at professor, stunning nod to Summers | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe May 30, 2011

The two in one cheap shot at Cornel West and applause for Larry Summers leaves me gasping for air ("Cornel West: Summers was right," May 24). Rupert Murdoch will want to hire who- ever wrote the editorial parodying West's legitimate disgust with a president who has difficulty uttering the words "poor" or "unemployed." The Wall Street Journal must have a beat for someone who, in the same breath, took the opportunity to heap praise on Summers, the man ousted from Harvard's presidency after insulting women and African-American faculty, and the man who, while deputy secretary and secretary of the treasury, eviscerated the Glass- Steagall Act that might have stood in the way of the Wall Street financial meltdown. 

JERRY MELDON Medford

The writer is an associate professor in the chemical and biological engineering depart- ment at Tufts University.

The CIA's Ghosts of Tegucigalpa | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on July 14, 2009

Sourced from: https://consortiumnews.com/2009/071409a.html

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The CIA's Ghosts of Tegucigalpa

Billy Joya, security adviser to Honduras’s post-coup-d’etat President Roberto Micheletti, offered the following explanation for the armed forces’ June 28 insurrection ousting democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya:
Joya said Zelaya had been following the same “Marxist-Leninist strategy” for tightening his grip on power that Chilean President Salvador Allende had in 1973 when Gen. Augusto Pinochet toppled Allende.

At least, Joya is right about this much: The assault on Honduras’s fragile democracy was reminiscent of Pinochet’s 1973 putsch. But Joya’s justification says more about where he and Micheletti are coming from than it does about Zelaya, whose real offense was to run afoul of the Honduran oligarchs.

The Organization of American States and United Nations have condemned the coup and demanded Zelaya’s reinstatement. But the Obama administration has been characteristically cautious, expressing displeasure and suspending military ties, but stopping short of economic sanctions that might lead to some second thoughts among the coup leaders.

Does the White House’s chariness reflect fear that a reinstated Zelaya might take some revenge by releasing records revealing Reagan-era CIA collaboration with brutal Honduran generals and their drug kingpin partners?
Does Obama prefer, as he does regarding George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, to never look backwards even when the history involves serious crimes?

Pleasing the Putschists

  Obama's disinterest in history would please Micheletti and his fellow putschists, not least Billy Joya, who in the early 1980s was a captain in Battalion 3-16, a brutal Honduran intelligence unit that was trained and equipped by the CIA.

A 1995 Baltimore Sun investigation of Reagan-era crimes documented the battalion’s use of shock and suffocation devices and its murder of 184 victims. The U.S. Embassy knew what was going on, but continued to work closely with Battalion 3-16’s leaders.

The CIA got into bed with homicidal uniformed Hondurans because the Agency - Washington’s primary tool for achieving goals antithetical to American values - has always operated that way.

Indeed, the story of how Nazi-like tactics spread across Latin America and other parts of the world can be traced back to the days just after World War II. Washington – in the name of “fighting communism” – recruited fugitive Nazi war criminals like SS Capt. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, France, who escaped across so-called “rat lines” to South America and helped organize right-wing intelligence services.

In those years, the newly formed CIA embraced not only ex-Nazis but their methods. Nazi war criminals smuggled to South America taught Nazi torture techniques to the region's intelligence services.

“Butcher of Lyon” Barbie did it in Bolivia. SS Col. Walter Rauff, developer of mobile gas vans and answerable for some 90,000 deaths during World War II, did likewise in Chile for Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The Carter-Reagan Divide

Breaking with this collaboration in the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter embargoed arms sales to South America’s more flagrant human rights violators. However, when Carter left the Oval Office, the old ways returned with a vengeance under Ronald Reagan.

Even before the 1980 election, members of the ruling elite in Guatemala – where death squads had been operating with impunity for decades – were confident that Reagan’s victory would revive Washington’s holy war against communism.
They were confident because two pillars of the American far right, Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea until Carter sacked him for insubordination, and retired Gen. Daniel Graham, a former senior official at the CIA who advised the Reagan campaign, had assured them.

As if to underscore the message, the Republicans invited Guatemalan Mario Sandoval Alarcon, “Godfather” of Central American death squads, to Reagan’s inaugural ball.

In the years that followed Guatemala’s bloodbath would get even bloodier where more than 100,000 would die. Ditto for El Salvador, where some 75,000 lives would be snuffed out as the CIA helped another right-wing military crush peasant and labor uprisings.

In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration would go on the offensive because leftist Sandinista guerrillas had defeated the ruthless and corrupt Somoza dynasty in 1979, some 43 years after Washington had installed it.
Determined not to let Nicaragua become another Cuba, the Reagan administration went to work countering the revolution by reorganizing the remnants of the Somoza dictatorship’s National Guard, which was blamed for slaughtering some 50,000 Nicaraguans in 1978 and 1979.

In the early 1980s, Reagan hailed this ragtag army as “freedom fighters.” To the rest of the world, they were the “contras” and were widely regarded as drug-tainted terrorists. (In a private conversation with senior CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, even Reagan accepted some of that reality, calling the contras “vandals.”)

Death-Squad Veterans

Right-wing Argentine intelligence units and the CIA began whipping the contras into shape in Honduras, which had the misfortune of bordering Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua – the three hot spots for Reagan’s determination to draw a line against leftist gains in the region.

Honduras would trade in its traditional “Banana Republic” moniker for “Pentagon Republic.”

In establishing the contra operation, the CIA collaborated with Argentine instructors whose prior work had included organizing a “dirty war” that had tortured and killed tens of thousands of dissidents in Argentina.

On March 17, 1981, President Reagan hosted Gen. Roberto Viola of Argentina, who was about to be sworn in as president. Extending the general his best wishes, Reagan promised Viola that he would lift the embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed on U.S. arms sales to Buenos Aires.

Though Argentina’s hand in training the contras is well known, its broader role in the CIA’s Central America “counterinsurgency” operations is not as well appreciated, nor is the price Hondurans paid for the fact that the Honduran Army officers with whom the CIA worked most closely made the murderous Argentines their role models.

  Initially, the Argentine dirty warriors taught Honduran soldiers and the contras how repression was handled in Buenos Aires, including, torture, high-profile assassinations and “disappearances,” the secret murder of political targets.

  According to J. Patrice McSherry, author of Predatory States, “Some of the Argentine officers involved were key Condor figures … Condor was extended to Central America.”

What was Condor?

In Operation Condor, South American intelligence teams joined forces to operate across borders to kidnap and assassinate their countries’ political exiles, essentially denying them safe haven anywhere in the world.

That explained how corpses of Bolivian refugees would turn up in Buenos Aires garbage dumps in August 1974. One month later, in that same city, a car bombing claimed the lives of Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife. Prats had opposed the 1973 coup d’etat led by Gen. Pinochet that overthrew Chile’s progressive president, Salvador Allende.

Despite release of historical documents about this right-wing international terror campaign, the mainstream U.S. media has devoted little attention to Operation Condor, in part it would seem because of the background roles of respected American leaders such as former CIA Director George H.W. Bush and ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

A 1978 State Department document, discovered by Prof. McSherry in 2001, provides evidence that the U.S. government facilitated communication among the intelligence chiefs who were collaborating in Operation Condor.

In the document, a cable from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert E. White to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance says Washington’s link to Condor might be exposed by an ongoing investigation into the Sept. 21, 1976, assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt in broad daylight in Washington, D.C.

Letelier, like Prats, had been an outspoken critic of Chilean strongman Pinochet. And like Prats, Letelier was murdered in a car bombing that Pinochet’s intelligence agency, DINA, had assigned to Michael V. Townley, an American expatriate closely linked to CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles and European neo-fascist terrorists.

  Notably, George H.W. Bush was CIA director at the time of the Letelier murder and Agency informants had attended a meeting three months earlier at which the terror operations were discussed. Bush then helped stonewall the ensuing FBI investigation. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Disrupting the Peace

Prior to the Argentines’ arrival in Honduras, the country had enjoyed relative peace, isolated from the violence across the country’s borders with Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Soon, however, the Honduran police and armed forces would begin their own murderous campaign against a tiny group of domestic guerrillas and their suspected sympathizers.

  In 1979, Honduran chief of police Amilcar Zelaya Rodriguez formed the secret Grupo de los 14, a goon squad that specialized in the disappearance and torture of state enemies. After President Reagan and Vice President Bush took office in 1981, the violence in Honduras escalated.

Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez assumed control of Grupo de los 14. In Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League, Scott and Jon Lee Anderson characterized the Honduran officer as follows:

General Alvarez did not invent Honduran paramilitary squads, but he was the man who streamlined them, integrated them into the armed forces, and allowed them to conduct a dirty war.

A vitriolic anticommunist who graduated from Argentina’s Colegio Militar in 1961, Alvarez would maintain contact with his instructors there, most notably Jorge Rafael Videla, who would head the Argentine junta during the Argentine dirty war’s bloodiest period.

In addition, Alvarez received advanced training at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone, where he attended the School of the Americas, known to critics as the “School of the Assassins.”

With his ambition, ruthlessness and sleaziness, Alvarez was just the man the CIA was looking for. Alvarez had Grupo de los 14’s members undergo counterinsurgency training by U.S., Argentine and Chilean instructors. The group expanded over time and was renamed Batallion 3-16.

One of the group’s instructors, Ciga Correa, had been a member of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (“Triple-A”), a death squad that operated on the front lines of Argentina’s dirty war. One of his Triple-A missions was the 1974 Operation Condor assassination of Gen. Prats.

In an offshoot of Operation Condor, Correa joined an Argentine unit in Guatemala City that targeted suspected Argentine guerrillas who had fled to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Under the tutelage of Correa and his associates, Alvarez’s thugs kidnapped, tortured, murdered and “disappeared” Honduran guerrillas and their supporters, whose numbers had swelled following the Sandinista triumph next door in Nicaragua.

Flash Forward to 2001

In 2001, Society of Helpers Sister Laetitia Bordes read that President George W. Bush planned to nominate John D. Negroponte to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. At the time, she recalled a face-to-face meeting in 1982 with Negroponte in his office as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

She had made the journey to ask a nagging question: What had happened to 32 women who had fled to Honduras to escape El Salvador’s death squads in the months following the March 24, 1980, assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador?
 
Sometime after arriving in Honduras, the women had been forcibly taken from their living quarters and shoved into vans, never to be seen again. Negroponte, who had worked closely with Gen. Alvarez, dissembled, disavowing knowledge of the women’s whereabouts and insisting that the U.S. Embassy kept its hands out of Honduran government affairs.

Twelve years after that encounter, Sister Laetitia realized that Negroponte had lied to her. She read a Honduran Human Rights Commission report on the torture and disappearance of political prisoners. It specifically mentioned Negroponte’s complicity in human rights violations.

In 1996, Sister Laetitia read a Baltimore Sun interview with Jack Binns, Negroponte’s predecessor in Tegucigalpa. Binns recalled that a group of Salvadorans, including the women about whose whereabouts Sister Laetitia had inquired, had been captured on April 22, 1981, tortured by members of the Honduran Secret Police, placed aboard Salvadoran military helicopters and, after taking off, thrown out of the helicopters. Binns added that U.S. authorities had been informed about the incident.

The Honduran government eventually recognized 184 disappearances in that era: 39 Nicaraguans, 28 Salvadorans, five Costa Ricans, four Guatemalans, one American, one Ecuadoran, one Venezuelan and 105 Hondurans. Human rights organizations believe the numbers were considerably higher. (Ultimately, President George W. Bush selected Negroponte for a string of important assignments: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, the nation’s first “Intelligence Czar” and, finally, in 2007, Deputy Secretary of State.)

Military Turmoil

In early 1982, Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova promoted Negroponte’s sidekick, Grupo de los 14 leader Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, to the rank of general. Before the year was over, Alvarez had decimated Honduras’s tiny guerrilla movement and was promoted to Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

The appointment bred resentment in more senior officers – and as Hondurans grew fed up with their country’s exploitation by Washington as a base for the Nicaraguan contras, the resentment among Gen. Alvarez’s enemies grew.

The boil burst in March 1984, when Honduran Air Force commander Gen. Walter Lopez Reyes spearheaded an internal military coup that drove Alvarez into exile in the United States. The violence in Honduras soon tapered off.

CIA Tegucigalpa station chief Donald Winters, who had asked Alvarez to be the godfather to his adopted daughter, was reassigned elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the contras – a brutal and ineffective fighting force – were becoming a headache for the White House. Reports of the CIA mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and a CIA training manual that sanctioned the assassination of civilians undermined support for Ronald Reagan’s Central American proxy wars.

Anticipating congressional cutoff of funding for the contras, the White House convened a National Security Planning Group meeting on June 25, 1984. The meeting was marked by heated debate about whether seeking third-country support for the contras would expose President Reagan to impeachment.

Vice President Bush asserted that soliciting the contra aid would be lawful unless the United States promised to give the third parties something in return. Nonetheless, Reagan personally approved, with Bush’s active involvement, special aid for Honduras as an implicit quid pro quo for helping the contras.

According to the minutes of a Feb. 7, 1985, meeting of high-level Reagan administration officials, which were released at the later trial of Reagan’s point man for the contras, Lt. Col. Oliver North, the “principals agreed … to provide several enticements in exchange for … continued support” of the contras.

Twelve days after the meeting, Reagan released millions of dollars in economic aid to Honduras.

The Drug Connection

The Reagan administration also did what it could to protect its Honduran friends who ran afoul of the law.

On Nov. 1, 1984, the FBI arrested eight men in Miami and charged them with plotting to overthrow the Honduran government and assassinate President Suazo. The alleged aim of the scheme, which was financed by $40 million in cocaine profits, was to reinstate Gen. Alvarez as Chairman of Honduras’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The Honduran government asked Washington to hand over Alvarez, but he remained safe within U.S. borders, even benefiting from a $50,000 Pentagon contract for a six-month study of “low-intensity conflict” in Central America.
  Alvarez also reportedly spent time as the house guest in Miami of international arms trader Gerard Latchinian, one of the richest men in Honduras, where he was known as the “ambassador of death.” Latchinian got 30 years in prison for his role in the drug-financed coup/assassination plot.

What made the stench even worse was Washington’s treatment of Alvarez’s chum, Gen. Jose Bueso-Rosa. Bueso had served as Army Chief of Staff and was an avid supporter of the contras until Alvarez’s March 1984 ouster – following which Bueso was demoted to military attaché in Santiago, Chile.

For his role in the assassination plot, Bueso turned himself in to federal authorities in Miami. In June 1986, he pleaded guilty to two federal counts of “traveling in furtherance of a conspiracy to plan an assassination” and was sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison.

The light sentence must have been related to Oliver North’s appeals to State and Justice Department officials for intervention on Bueso’s behalf. Two U.S. government officials, one serving and one retired, testified as character witnesses at Bueso’s sentencing hearing, and the Reagan administration submitted an appeal for leniency that read in part:

“General Bueso-Rosa has always been a valuable ally to the United States. As chief of staff of Honduras’s armed forces he immeasurably furthered U.S. national interests in Central America. He is primarily responsible for the initial success of the American military preserve in Honduras. For this service he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the President of the United States, the highest award that can be presented to a foreign military officer.” [See Scott and Marshall’s Cocaine Politics.]

Reagan also had awarded the Legion of Merit to Gen. Alvarez.

‘Lenient’ Sentence

The presiding judge decided that the additional information trumped the Justice Department’s description of the assassination conspiracy as “the most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.” A senior Justice Department official called the five-year sentence meted out to Bueso “lenient.”

But it wasn’t lenient enough for Oliver North. As authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall reported, North sent a note to his then boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, saying there remained one “problem.”
  The general was the man with whom North and three other senior U.S. officials had “worked out arrangements” for contra support, and Bueso had entered a guilty plea on the assumption that he would be given time at a minimum security prison “for a short period [days or weeks] and then walk free.”

“Our major concern,” North wrote, “is that when Bueso finds out what is really happening to him, he will break his longstanding silence about the [contras} and other sensitive operations.” [Emphasis added.]

North and some of his colleagues were therefore going to “cabal quietly … to look into options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to keep Bueso from feeling like he was lied to in legal process and start spilling the beans.”

Poindexter reassured North: “You may advise all concerned that the President will want to be as helpful as possible to settle this matter.” In the end, the Justice Department blocked clemency or deportation, and Bueso-Rosa served his time and kept his mouth shut.

But the late 1984 timing of Bueso’s drug-financed assassination plot suggests that it may have been one of those other sensitive operations that Oliver North cagily referred to in his note to Poindexter. The Honduran general’s drug/assassination conspiracy may have been part of the Reagan administration’s elaborate plans to sustain the contras.

  A revitalized Honduran connection would have guaranteed Tegucigalpa's crucial support. The coup’s failure led to Plan B: economic leverage with President Suazo. And because a congressional ban on aiding the contras, known as the Boland Amendment, made that impeachable, it became a top priority to conceal Reagan’s and Bush’s roles.

The Bush family name was further protected by President George H.W. Bush’s Christmas Eve 1992 pardons to six key Iran-Contra defendants, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. To save his own skin, Weinberger was expected to incriminate Bush in the Iran-Contra cover-up.

Bill Clinton’s opposition to the Iran-Contra investigation when he assumed the presidency in 1993 also helped spare Bush from having to answer a new round of questions from special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh.

Walsh’s truncated investigation had touched on – but failed to pursue – the contra-cocaine aspect of the Iran-Contra Affair, of which the Bueso-Rosa/Latchinian conspiracy was just the tip of a narcotics-filled iceberg.

Consortiumnews.com’s Robert Parry, the late Gary Webb and others – with no help, indeed with resistance from the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times – have painstakingly established that the contras were the beneficiaries of and in some cases in cahoots with drug traffickers. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]

Digging Deeper

So let’s delve a bit further into the Honduran Connection.

   A 1983 US Customs report noted that the Honduran cargo firm SETCO Air was headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Class I DEA violator in partnership with “American businessmen who are … smuggling narcotics into the United States.”

Six years later, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, headed by John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, issued a multi-volume report, “Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy.”

The report noted, among other sensational findings, that SETCO Air was “the principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel for the FDN [Nicaraguan Democratic Force], carrying at least a million rounds of ammunition, food, uniforms and other military supplies for the Contras from 1983 to 1985.”

In other words, unfazed by the 1983 Customs report that had identified Matta Ballestero as a Class I violator – which meant drug kingpin, top of the food chain – the Reagan administration retained his airline for another two years as the contra’s chief mover of supplies.

Yet what makes Matta’s case special is just how far Washington would go to keep him in business. In 1970, Matta marked himself as a big-time trafficker when he was arrested at Dulles Airport outside Washington for importing 54 pounds of cocaine. But he was sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison, and a year later he tiptoed out the door and didn’t come back.

By 1973, the DEA considered Matta important enough to entrap in a sting operation. But either the narcs blew it or someone told them not to try.

Two years later, the DEA learned that Matta had teamed up with Mexican drug kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a tonnage supplier to El Norte with Colombian and Peruvian connections. The partnership would make Matta a billionaire.

A 1978 DEA intelligence report cited by James Mills in his penetrating study, The Underground Empire, noted that Matta had financed a coup d’etat in his native Honduras that was led by his partner, Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia.

Transfer Point

  Even before that coup, Honduras had been the transfer point for half a billion dollars worth of northbound drugs. In the three years following the coup, Matta Ballesteros and President Paz Garcia made Honduras an even bigger cocaine trafficking center.

  As Scott and Marshall note in Cocaine Politics, when these events unfolded, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and it was his administration that overlooked Matta Ballesteros’s behind-the-scenes role in Honduran politics.

However, unlike the Carter administration, the incoming Reagan team didn’t simply turn a blind eye. It found Honduras’s corruption an ideal environment for nourishing the contra war.

Matta’s number one Honduran government enabler after President Paz was Col. Leonidas Torres Arias, the head of military intelligence and a key figure in making the necessary arrangements for opening contra training camps.
In August 1981, Col. Torres met secretly in Guatemala City with Argentine intelligence officer Mario Davico, the CIA’s Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, Honduran Gen. Alvarez Martinez and President Paz Garcia.

A tripartite agreement emerged for waging the contra war on Nicaragua. Argentine intelligence would handle organization, administration and training; the CIA would supply the funds; and Honduras would provide the territory for operational bases.

At the time, Davico was second in command of Argentine Army Intelligence and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. He would soon relocate to Honduras to teach Alvarez’s Batallion 3-16 the Argentine “dirty war” techniques of arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions and disposal of cadavers.

All three Hondurans – Torres Arias, Alvarez Martinez and Paz Garcia – were considered to be in the pockets of the drug lords. As Scott and Marshall put it: “The CIA relied totally on the cocaine-trafficking military in Honduras to back its plans to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.”

But concerns about drug trafficking did little to dissuade the Reagan administration from teaming up with the Honduran military. That, however, meant that the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration would be operating at cross purposes.

The DEA agent in charge of its recently opened Tegucigalpa office, Thomas Zepeda, had documented the complicity of Col. Torres Arias and other high-ranking Honduran officers in Matta Ballesteros’s drug operations.

But DEA needed the Honduran military’s assistance to arrest Torres and his cronies, and the CIA needed them to support the contras. To avoid a showdown with the CIA, the DEA’s Zepeda proposed that a grand jury be empanelled to investigate corruption in the Honduran armed forces.

But the CIA nixed the idea, no doubt to protect its collaborators. As one high-level diplomat later noted: “Without the support of the Honduran military there would have been no such thing as the contras. It’s that simple … So they got rid of the DEA station.”

The DEA Tegucigalpa station was shut down - in June 1983, just as the CIA station was doubling in size - in a naked move to preclude a serious drug investigation. That same month, Customs asked Zepeda to investigate Matta’s airline, SETCO, which would soon be flying supplies to the contras.

Brutal Murder

But the worst was still to come. Shortly after noon on Feb. 7, 1985, DEA undercover agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena walked out of the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico for a lunch date with his wife.

Two Jalisco state policemen, two hired killers and a drug lord’s lieutenant drove up alongside, told Camarena “the commandante wants to see you,” and shoved him into their car. They sped to a house that was owned by drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero.

Camarena was questioned and tortured there for the next 30 hours. His interrogator, a captured tape would reveal, was a commander in the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Mexico’s FBI. One month later, Camarena’s mutilated body was discovered next to that of his Mexican pilot.

  First it was assumed that the motive for the murders had been raids Camarena had led on vast marijuana plantations, which had cost Cara Quintero and his partners an estimated $5 billion. But the interrogation, it turned out, focused on what Camarena knew about corruption in Mexico’s political hierarchy.

  That would explain why the men who attended the meeting at which Camarena’s abduction was planned reportedly included future Mexico City police chief Javier Garcia Paniagua, and Manuel Ibarra Herrera, the former head of Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police.

That same year, Newsweek would describe another attendee as the “boss of bosses of Mexico’s cocaine industry,” a man whose organization was believed to supply “perhaps one third of all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”
A DEA agent described the man as “the kind of individual who would be a decision maker of last resort. He is at the same level as the rulers of Medellin and Cali cartels.” That man was Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and at the planning meeting he reportedly announced “we will soon have the identity” of the DEA agent and he will be silenced.
Matta Ballesteros kept his promise. Camarena was silenced. The method, a forensic specialist determined, was the application of a Phillips-head screwdriver to the skull.

Hair sample analysis would establish Matta’s presence at the silencing. But it was only in 1990 that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles would finally put Matta away for life for cocaine trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy.

Significantly, a witness in the Camarena murder case told the DEA that the CIA had trained Nicaraguan contras on a ranch near Veracruz that was owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, the same drug kingpin who owned the house outside Guadalajara where Enrique Camarena was murdered.

Matta would be arrested in 1986 in Colombia. But he bought his way out of jail with a $2 million bribe and made his way back home to Honduras. That same year, which was three years after Customs had identified Matta as both a Class I DEA violator and the owner of SETCO Air – and after Matta had become a prime suspect in the Camarena murder - the State Department renewed SETCO’s contract to supply the contras.

For two more years Matta would live in luxury in Hondruas, seemingly unconcerned by any prospect of arrest since he still had many friends in high places. His generosity would endear him with Honduras’s abjectly poor masses. They called him Honduras’s “Robin Hood.”

But in March 1988, after the Iran-Contra scandal had devastated political support for the contra war in Washington, a truce was declared in Nicaragua. That eliminated Washington’s use for Honduras, and its need for drug kingpins like Matta and his partner, Mexican drug kingpin Felix Gallardo, who once told a DEA informant that he was “protected” because his drug profits were bankrolling the contras.

Only then were Felix Gallardo and Matta Ballesteros arrested and flown to the United States.

Belated Probe

When CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz belatedly investigated the contra-cocaine connection in the late 1990s, he documented the depth of CIA knowledge of drug traffickers and money-launderers connected to the contra war – and explained the key reason for protecting these criminals.

According to Hitz’s report, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.”

One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”

The CIA's manipulation of Honduran politics in pursuit of that goal was another part of the contra war’s legacy.
Besides the drug lords, other key players also ran afoul of the law or met their own rough justice.

The Argentine military junta self-imploded in the wake of the disastrous 1982 war with Great Britain over the Falklands/Malvinas islands, leading to a restoration of civilian rule and a judgment by an Argentine court denouncing the military government for genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Reagan’s guest, Gen. Viola, was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Honduran Gen. Alvarez Martinez returned to Honduras in 1987 and was silenced by an assassin on Jan. 25, 1989.
The CIA's Clarridge was indicted for perjury and lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

But the ghosts of Tegucigalpa continue to hover over Honduran politics. As Hondurans protest the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, many believe that Washington encouraged and supported the coup. Can anyone blame them?

They haven’t forgotten that during the Reagan era, the CIA and Argentine dirty warriors ran roughshod over their country. They also know that Roberto Micheletti’s security adviser, Billy Joya, was a member of one of those Reagan-era death squads.

They know, too, that Zelaya had been bucking Honduras’s powerful upper class with reforms like a 60 percent minimum wage increase and rejecting Washington’s “free trade” policies. Zelaya also challenged U.S. foreign policy by befriending Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

However badly President Barack Obama may want to look forward not backwards, Washington’s unacknowledged crimes of the past few decades keep intruding on the present.

Jerry Meldon is an Associate Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. Dedicated to the memory of Penny Lernoux. 

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Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Hyde | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News and The Tufts Daily on March 27, 2008

This afternoon, Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who served with distinction in the House of Representatives from 1965 to 1999 and has received over a dozen honorary degrees, will present the keynote speech at the Fares Center’s symposium, “The United States and the Middle East: What Comes Next After Iraq?”

 The title of his talk is “Iraq: Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond,” and I imagine that Mr. Hamilton will be thankful not to discuss “Yesterday.”

 Also, he probably would prefer not to re-visit fateful decisions he made while chairing investigations into Republican dirty work, especially those that let George H.W. Bush off the hook and cleared George W.’s path to the White House. Mr. Hamilton’s chairmanship of numerous post mortem inquiries into ill-conceived U.S. foreign affairs have empowered him to decide just how high the veil over the machinery of power would be lifted, if at all.

 As veteran journalist Robert Parry has persuasively argued on Consortiumnews.com, the Bush family name squeaked through the ’80s and early ’90s essentially mud-free for only a few reasons.

The first is that on Christmas Eve 1992, lame-duck president George H.W. Bush pardoned six of his earlier coconspirators in the Iran-Contra affair (the Reagan/Bush White House’s diversion of profits from illegal arms sales to Iran to bankroll Nicaragua’s contra terrorists in defiance of a congressional ban). Until he was pardoned, former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger had been expected to buy clemency by testifying against Bush.

The next reason is that President Bill Clinton cut short a congressional inquiry into Bush’s secret billion dollar loans to Saddam Hussein and Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-Contra investigation. And lastly, Mr. Hamilton soft-pedaled two key congressional inquiries: the first investigated Iran-Contra and the second examined allegations that the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign team had struck a treasonous deal with the hostage-holding Iranian government.

Conventional wisdom has attributed the target-friendliness of those latter investigations to Mr. Hamilton’s celebrated spirit of bipartisanship. After all, what else could have persuaded Mr. Hamilton to narrow the scope of the Iran-Contra investigation in order to placate Dick Cheney and the rest of the committee’s Republicans? And how else can one explain the committee’s ill-advised decision to immunize the testimony of a man on whom it had the goods, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North (whose operations in the Old Executive Office building had been exposed by Parry)? Thus emboldened, the cocky Col. North proceeded to cover up for Vice President Bush.

Hamilton’s Iran-Contra performance was troubling. But he went several steps further when he chaired the October Surprise Task Force and handed the Reagan/Bush administration a deck full of get-out-of-jail-free cards. In the lead-up to the 1980 election, Republicans feared that Jimmy Carter would pull off an “October Surprise” and talk the Iranians into releasing 52 American hostages.

Carter’s failure to do so cost him the election. However, over the next several years a parade of individuals alleged that he failed only because the Republicans had secretly agreed to arm Iran in exchange for a delay in the hostages’ release.

Heated Republican denials notwithstanding, the fact remained that the Iranians chose to end the hostages’ 444-day ordeal within hours of Reagan’s inauguration. To put nasty rumors to rest, the House Foreign Affairs Committee formed a task force under the co-chairmanship of Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Lee Hamilton. The task force was charged with examining allegations that in the summer and fall of 1980, Republican heavyweights, notably the vice presidential candidate, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and the campaign director, future CIA Director William J. Casey, had secretly flown to Europe to strike the fateful deal. The key issue was the veracity of Bush’s and Casey’s alibis.

In the heat of his 1992 re-election campaign, an angry President Bush accused the task force of waging a “witch hunt.” Obligingly, the task force disclosed that Secret Service records backed his alibi. That prompted Spencer Oliver, counsel to the Foreign Affairs Committee, to challenge the accuracy of the Secret Service records. Oliver also charged the Bush administration with stonewalling the task force.

“They have sought to block, limit, restrict and discredit the investigation in every possible way,” he said. “President Bush’s recent outbursts [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of 1980 are disingenuous at best since the administration has refused to make available the documents and the witnesses that could finally and conclusively clear Mr. Bush.”

“The Bush administration flatly refused to give any more information to the House task force unless it agreed never to interview [Mr. Bush’s] alibi witness and never to release [that person’s] name,” Parry added. “Amazingly, the task force accepted the administration’s terms.”

Hamilton’s treatment of Mr. Bush was outrageously deferential. But it was pitbull-like compared to how he handled the attempts to provide the late Mr. Casey with an alibi. The Republicans first insisted that Casey could not have flown to meet with the Iranians at the alleged time because during that particular weekend he had attended a historical conference in London. But that alibi had to be ditched when historian and conference attendee Robert Dallek reported that Casey had missed a strategically timed morning session.

 No problem. A new alibi was introduced that instead placed Casey at California’s Bohemian Grove retreat. As it turned out, Casey had indeed stayed at the Bohemian Grove, only not on the decisive weekend.

Unfazed, Hamilton’s task force acted as if Casey’s alibi remained solid and issued a report that exonerated both Casey and Bush. Not long afterward, task force co-chair Henry Hyde acknowledged that Casey’s 1980 passport had vanished along with key pages in his personal calendar.

 Unperturbed, Lee Hamilton penned a New York Times Op-Ed in which he cited Casey’s so-called alibi in insisting that his task force’s report “should put the controversy to rest once and for all.” Only later did Robert Parry rummage through the task force’s records to discover a photograph of the 16 men who had been at the Bohemian Grove on that notorious weekend in the summer of 1980 in the company, supposedly, of William Casey. But Casey was not in the photo — a fact that the task force had conveniently neglected to report.

This afternoon the Tufts community will have the opportunity to ask Mr. Hamilton exactly why he has repeatedly kept Americans in the dark about critical episodes in their history. It is an opportunity not to be missed.

Why US Shields Japan's WWII Denials | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on February 24, 2007

Why US Shields Japan's WWII Denials

By Jerry Meldon

February 24, 2007

Editor's Note: Over the years, we have written a number of stories about Rev. Sun Myung Moon's influence-buying schemes inside U.S. conservative political circles – and the federal government's odd refusal to aggressively enforce laws when Moon's operation is caught in legally questionable activities. [See, for instance, Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'.]

In this guest article, Jerry Meldon examines the mysterious roots of the money that has funded right-wing Asian politics since World War II and that has sometimes spilled over into the United States:

On Feb. 19, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso took exception to a U.S. congressional resolution introduced by Rep. Mike Honda, D-California, calling on Japan to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility” for coercing 200,000 Asian women into slavery as “Comfort Women” (wartime prostitutes) for 3.5 million Japanese soldiers. Mr. Aso said he considers the accusation groundless and extremely regrettable.

Six decades after World War II, can it really be that Japanese officials are still distorting history and insulting the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and others across Asia whom Hirohito’ s forces savagely brutalized and robbed?

And why does Washington turn a deaf ear?

The answers may be rooted in what transpired behind closed doors in Tokyo when Japan was occupied by the U.S. military in the post-war years .

Sterling and Peggy Seagrave suggest a motive in their  eye-opening – and at times stomach-turning – 2003 book, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of Allied occupying forces, secretly joined hands with Japanese war criminals.

Rather than convict, imprison and throw away the keys, MacArthur coddled those responsible for one of history’s bloodiest wars of aggression. When the U.S. occupation ended in 1952, he released all those who were still in custody.

And it may have gone a lot further than that.

According to Gold Warriors, even as the United States  “introduced democratic reforms and a new constitution … [it ] put Japan back under the control of men who were devotedly undemocratic … [insisting] that Japan never stole anything and was flat broke … [when, in reality, America had given it ] huge infusions of black money.”

Washington even had Article 14 of the 1951 Japan Peace Treaty state : “It is recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognized that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient … [Therefore] the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan.”

As historian Christopher Simpson put it , the United States thereby insured “that the victims of the war – rape camp survivors, slave laborers and POWs – [would] be left with nothing.”

Furthermore, according to the Seagraves, “records of Japan’s looting and economic conspiracy have been removed from Western archives and databases, remain under secret classification and will not be made public for another half-century.”

The cover-up notwithstanding, the Seagraves somehow penetrated the veil of secrecy and reported that the source of the black money that MacArthur bestowed on the Japanese. They wrote that after arriving in Japan, the general’s aides located $100 billion in gold, platinum and other treasures that Hirohito’s forces had systematically plundered from occupied Asian nations and buried deep underground.

When MacArthur reported this to Washington, President Harry S. Truman’s brain trust – which included John McCloy, who as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany would authorize the early release of many Nazi war criminals – decided to devote  the fortune to covert operations such as the bankrolling of rightist political parties and the recruitment of war criminals as U.S. intelligence agents for the Cold War that was just beginning.

One of the most notorious crooks MacArthur embraced was yakuza godfather Yoshio Kodama. With the exalted rank of rear admiral in the Japanese navy, Kodama had overseen the wartime looting of Asia’s criminal infrastructure. In the process, he stashed away a personal fortune estimated at $13 billion.

Arrested as a Class A war criminal, he made a deal with MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Gen. Charles Willoughby. Kodama handed the CIA $100 million in return for his release from Sugamo Prison. Returning to the underworld, he regained control of the Asian heroin traffic.

According to the Seagraves and others, he also remained a CIA asset until his death in 1984. It was apparently in that capacity that he became a major behind-the-scenes political force, primarily in Japan but, indirectly, across the Pacific as well.

Together with his fellow racketeer and Class A war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa, Kodama underwrote the creation of two Japanese political parties that later combined to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Except for a brief hiatus when voters had had their fill of corruption, the conservative LDP has ruled Japan ever since. According to sources cited by the Seagraves, the LDP secretly contributed to the 1960 presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

The LDP was not the only organization  which Kodama and Sasakawa bankrolled, that lavished the gangsters’ ill-begotten wealth on American politicians. They also underwrote the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, which owns the right-wing daily, the Washington Times.

When Gen. Park Chung Hee staged a coup and installed himself as South Korea’s dictator in 1961, he designated the Unification Church to be his political arm. Successive South Korean leaders have used it to influence U.S. foreign policy.

A 1978 congressional inquiry found that Moon’s organization, in coordination with South Korea’s CIA-molded intelligence agency, the KCIA, paid off several U.S. congressmen. Rep. Richard Hanna, D-California, and Otto Passman, D-Louisiana, accepted approximately $200,000 each.

Hanna was slapped with a six-to-30-month sentence and spent a year behind bars. Passman managed to have himself tried in his home town and was acquitted. Fortunately for Reps. Cornelius Gallagher, D-New Jersey, and William Marshall, R-Ohio, the five-year statute of limitations ran out before they could be prosecuted. Three others congressmen were reprimanded for lying about their gifts.

Kodama and Sasakawa, together with followers of Rev. Moon, also underwrote the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) as a propaganda mill for the dictatorships of Taiwan and South Korea. In 1966, the APACL expanded to become the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) . European neo-nazi terrorists and Latin American death squad leaders attended WACL conferences in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ronald Reagan – whose 1981 presidential inauguration was attended by the godfather of Central America’s death squads, Mario Sandoval Alarcon – sent the following message to the 1985 WACL convention in Dallas:

“I commend you all for your part in this noble cause. Our combined efforts are moving the tide of history toward world freedom. We must persevere and never falter. I send all you who help in your crusade for liberty my best wishes. God bless you.”

The previous year, Congress had blocked continued White House funding for the counter-revolutionary Nicaraguan contras. Undaunted, the Reagan administration solicited donations from private right-wing sources, including the two organizations that Kodama and Sasakawa had spawned. WACL and the Unification Church each obliged the Reagan team with generous donations that kept the contras afloat.

In that same period, WACL also contributed heavily in the United States to right-wing candidates running against progressive incumbents. One such beneficiary, WACL conferee Steven Symms, unseated the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church, D-Idaho. A prominent Vietnam War critic, Church had chaired a 1975 Senate investigation that uncovered CIA  plots to assassinate foreign leaders.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, a picture emerges of CIA-controlled Japanese wartime loot being funneled by Japanese war criminals, via rightist Asian conduit organizations, to American politicians.

Maybe that explains why Washington turns a deaf ear when Japanese officials sanitize their country’s wartime atrocities. After all, the bruised feelings of a couple of billion Asian mainlanders is a small price to pay for keeping a lid on the truth.

Jerry Meldon is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Not just Fox News: Mainstream media are agents of ignorance | By Jerry Meldon | published in The Tufts Daily March 30, 2006

Americans know that President Bush bilked them into supporting his war of aggression in Iraq with false claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and support for Al Qaeda. They know the President’s policies on Iraq and Israel and the Palestinians have weakened national security. They realize he has squandered the sympathy and good will towards the United States that were evoked by the events of Sept. 11. But they can’t understand why anti-Americanism has become so pervasive.

In part, that’s because they don’t know realize that anti-Americanism was widespread even pre-G.W. Bush – and it wasn’t only due to propaganda. The main reason they’re in the dark is that the media has failed to do its job.

Bigoted, warmongering, right wing talk radio is one of the culprits. But primary responsibility for American ignorance of how the rest of the world experiences U.S. might lies with the mainstream media – not only Fox and CNN, but the New York Times, the Washington Post and, sorry to say, the Boston Globe.

Editorial page hyping of the buildup to the War in Iraq simply reprised media support for the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations as each waded deeper into the Vietnamese quagmire. It was only after relentless nationwide student-and-faculty-led demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins and marches that the mainstream media joined the anti-war bandwagon.

Thanks to media self-censorship and the generally hands-off attitude of academics, most Americans are unaware that throughout the Cold War, Washington consistently supported, in the name of anti-communism, with billions in military aid and/or American blood, anti-democratic forces including, in Latin America in particular, brutal right-wing military dictators. Most Americans are unaware of:

– U.S. intelligence recruitment of major German and Japanese war criminals in the aftermath of World War II.

– CIA bankrolling of, and reliance for information on postwar Russia and Eastern Europe, and on the KGB-infiltrated intelligence network run by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who had similarly served Hitler.

– CIA collaboration with the heroin-trafficking Marseilles underworld in the late ’40s and early ’50s to break the back of a French left widely revered for its wartime service in the anti-Nazi underground;

– CIA collaboration with heroin-trafficking generals and dictators against communist-led revolutionaries in Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s;

– CIA collaboration with Osama bin Laden and heroin-trafficking local warlords to oust the Russian Army from Afghanistan in the ’80s;

– CIA collaboration with

cocaine-trafficking Latin American mafiosi and generals in support of the hospital-bombing contras – whom then-President Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters” – in Nicaragua in the ’80s;

– The CIA-engineered overthrow of elected left-leaning governments in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and numerous other parts of the “Free World.”

If they knew more about these skeletons in Uncle Sam’s closet, Americans might better understand the depth of anti-Americanism worldwide. They might even become critical of U.S. foreign policy.

At 3 p.m. Friday in Pearson 104, Long Island University political science Professor J. Patrice McSherry and journalist Robert Parry will discuss U.S.-backed state terrorism in Latin America in the ’70s and ’80s, and U.S. media self-censorship on this and many of the above subjects.

It’s a great opportunity for a crash course on “Why They Hate Us and You Don’t Know Why.”

Viewpoint | One of Our Own Terrorists Comes in from the Cold | By Jerry Meldon | published in The Tufts Daily April 26, 2005

“What a fix he’s in!”

I can hear it now. A Miami attorney pleads on behalf of 78-year-old Luis Posada Carriles, who four weeks ago emerged from the shadows to seek political asylum in South Florida.

“Protect him from the brutal prisons of Fidel Castro and that Venezuelan Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez [both of whom want him handed over to face murder charges]!! After what this great patriot and freedom fighter has done for the United States, he deserves the Medal of Honor, not extradition!”

Indeed, Posada has done a lot for Uncle Sam since the CIA trained him for the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of his native Cuba. In the ensuing four-plus decades, both on and off the Washington payroll, he has waged a bloody personal vendetta against the Cuban patriarch, both directly through an endless series of assassination plots, and indirectly through bombings including the 1976 sabotage of a Cuban airliner that claimed 73 innocent lives. In 1985, after bribing his way out of a Venezuelan prison where he had been incarcerated for the Cuban plane bombing, Posada took charge of the Reagan team’s contra supply operations in El Salvador.

In light of that record, and the precedents set by our current president and his father, which are itemized below, you have to admit that Posada has a case for asylum:

* In 1990, after intense lobbying by Jeb Bush – which 10 years later won votes in Miami’s Little Havana that would help swing a presidential election – George H. W. Bush Sr.’s Justice Department shut down INS proceedings to expel the most notorious of all anti-Castro bombers, Dr. Orlando Bosch – after the Cuban-born pediatrician served time in Venezuela for co-masterminding the Cubana plane crash.

* On Christmas Eve 1992, the same President Bush, then a lame duck, pardoned Iran-Contra conspirators, including former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams. In so doing, Bush Sr. salvaged both his hide and the family’s good name. Iran-Contra Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh planned to pressure Weinberger into disavowing Bush’s claim that, while Reagan’s VP, he had been out of the Iran-Contra conspiracy loop. The pardoned Abrams, who had admitted lying to Congress, is deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush.

In fact, the Bush Jr. White House has been the nation’s leading employer of Iran-Contra conspirators, rehabilitated and otherwise. Recall the brief stint of Reagan’s indicted National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter. At Bush Jr.’s Homeland Security agency, before press exposure of his brainchild, the Total Information Awareness Project, he put fear in the hearts of privacy-cherishing Americans.

And just last week Congress rubber-stamped Bush Jr.’s nominee as National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. As Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras in the ’80s, the man whose task it will now be to reform the CIA coordinated contra actions in close collaboration with the same CIA and Honduran generals knee-deep in cocaine trafficking and death squad slayings.

So it’s understandable that Posada – who as recently as August was languishing behind bars for one of his Castro assassination plots when a lame duck Panamanian president … pardoned him – considers this a good time to hang up his grenades.

I believe Posada took the pardon as a signal that – despite what his lawyer might say – he’s not in a fix.

No, I think Posada believes the fix is in.